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Chapter one

How It All Began

What you could call my life on the road began when I first met Dean Moriarty, not long after my wife and I separated. Before that, I often dreamed of going West to see the country, always planning but never going. Dean is the perfect guy for the road because he was actually born on the road, when his parents were passing through Salt Lake City in 1926, on their way to Los Angeles. First reports of him came to me through Chad King. Chad showed me some letters from Dean, written in a New Mexico jail for kids. This is all far back, when Dean was not the way he is today, when he was just a mysterious jail-kid. Then news came that Dean was out of jail and was coming to New York for the first time; also there was talk that he had just married a girl called Marylou.

One day in college Chad and Tim Gray told me Dean was staying in rooms in East Harlem. He had arrived the night before with beautiful little Marylou. They got off the Greyhound bus at 50th Street, went around the corner to Hector’s cafe and bought beautiful big cream cakes.

All the time, Dean was telling Marylou things like: “Now, darling, here we are in New York and although I haven’t quite told you everything I was thinking when we crossed the Missouri River, its absolutely necessary now to postpone all those things concerning our personal love, and at once begin thinking of work-life plans…” That was the way he talked in those early days.

I went to their little apartment with the boys, and Dean came to the door in his shorts. Dean had blue eyes, and a real Oklahoma accent. He had worked on Ed Wall’s farm in Colorado before he married Marylou. She was a pretty blonde, with long curly hair. She sat on the couch, her smoky blue eyes staring. But although she was a sweet little girl, she was stupid and could do horrible things.

That night we drank beer and talked until dawn, and in the morning while we sat around smoking in the gray light of a gloomy day, Dean got up nervously, and walked around, thinking. Then he decided Marylou could get some breakfast. Later, I went away.

During the next week, he told Chad King that he absolutely had to learn how to write; Chad said that I was a writer and he should come to me for advice. Then Dean had a fight with Marylou in their Hoboken apartment just across the Hudson Paver from New York and she was so angry that she went to the police and accused Dean of some false, crazy thing so that Dean had to run away from Hoboken. He came right out to Paterson, New Jersey, where I was living with my aunt, and one night while I was studying there was a knock on the door. And there was Dean in the dark hall, saying, “Неllо, you remember me - Dean Moriarty? I’ve come to ask you to show me how to write.”

“And where’s Marylou?” I asked. And Dean said that she had gone back to Denver. So we went out to have a few beers because we couldn’t talk like we wanted to talk in front of my aunt, who took one look at Dean and decided that he was a madman.

In the bar I told Dean, “You didn’t come to me only to learn to be a writer, and anyway what do I really know about it except that you have to work and work at it.”

And he said, “Yes, of course, I know exactly what you mean and in fact all those problems have come to my attention, and…” and on and on about things I didn’t understand, and he didn’t either. But we understood each other on other levels of madness, and I agreed that he could stay at my house till he found a job. And we agreed to go out West at some time. That was the winter of 1947.

One night we went to New York, and it was the night that Dean met Carlo Marx. They liked each other immediately, and from that moment I did not see Dean as often as before. And I was a little sorry too.

But all the crazy things that were going to happen began then. It would mix up all my friends, and all I had left of my family, in a big dust cloud over the American Night. Carlo told Dean of Old Bull Lee, Elmer Hassel, Jane: Lee in Texas growing marijuana, Hassel in jail, Jane wandering on Times Square, full of drugs, with her baby girl in her arms, until somebody took her to Bellevue Hospital. And Dean told Carlo about people in the West like Tommy Snark, the card player, Big Ed Dunkel, his many girlfriends, sex parties, and other adventures.

Then the spring came, the great time of traveling, and everybody was getting ready to go on one trip or another. I was busy working on my novel. And when I was halfway, and after a trip down South with my aunt to visit my brother Rocco, I got ready to travel West for the very first time.

Dean left before me. Carlo and I went with him to the 34th Street Greyhound bus station. Dean was wearing a real Western business suit for his big trip back to Denver. It was blue, and he bought it in a store on Third Avenue for eleven dollars. He also had a small typewriter, and he said he was going to start writing as soon as he got a job and a room in Denver. We had a last meal together, then Dean got on a bus which said Chicago and went off into the night. I promised myself to go the same way soon.

And this was really the way that my whole road experience began, and the things that happened were amazing, and must be told.